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100 Facts On Reparations For Native Black Americans

100 Facts On Reparations For Native Black Americans


44. Reparations on a state level

While the federal government has been slow to address reparations, a few states have taken action on various acts of racism, not particularly slave labor.

In 2013, North Carolina became the first state to pass a law intended to compensate the surviving victims among the 7,600 people who were sterilized under a decades-long eugenics program. The victims were largely poor, disabled or African-American. State lawmakers set up a $10 million fund to compensate them, The New York Times reported. There were some conflicts over who was eligible as a state commission and state courts denied claims from relatives of victims who had died.

In Chicago, mostly Black men who survived brutal treatment by a Chicago police commander and his “midnight crew” of detectives were awarded a financial settlement as part of a $5.5 million reparations measure enacted by the city in 2015. Chicago agreed to compensate 57 victims — nearly all African-American men — who said the police had beaten, shocked, suffocated, and psychologically tortured them as a means to obtain confessions.

In 1994, Florida became the first state to pass a reparations law acknowledging a need to confront an eruption of racist violence that government officials failed to stop, The Times reported.

The act was a Florida massacre in 1923 during which a racist mob massacred Black residents in Rosewood, Fla., and burned the community to the ground.

The law set aside $2 million for survivors of the 1923 massacre, which began with an allegation that a Black man had assaulted a white woman. A white mob that included Ku Klux Klan members swarmed into the largely black hamlet of Rosewood and killed at least six Black residents, and perhaps many more. Churches and houses were burned, and the residents were displaced. They never returned.